By Todd Moore
Poetry is no good if it doesn’t grab you by your worthless throat and attempt to strangle you to death. Vladimir Mayakovsky might have said this as an aside while he was posing for a series of proto punk poses for Aleksandr Rodchenko back in 1924. Or, Ted Hughes might have whispered this little nothing in Syliva Plath’s ear during one of their private sexual/shamanic rituals somewhere out on some stonehenge moor. Whatever. The fact is, poetry really has no power over the reader unless it is a homicidally spiritual power that lures the reader in in in, relentlessly. What Nietzsche attempted with Zarathustra. What Shakespeare tried with Hamlet. What Dostoevsky knew he had achieved with Raskolnikov. The poem is nothing less than the welcoming axe, the psychic murder weapon. The reader is always murdered when the book is that powerful..
LAUGHING AT FUNERALS by David McLean, Epic Rites Press, 2010, falls right into this category, if category is really the right word. McLean’s book is death infested, every page pulses with some metaphor of demise.
under my clothes
under the clothes
i throw over this pain
the flesh lives fat and
naked and waits
the blunt interrogation
of the crow’s questing beak,
death’s distracting rape
the flesh lies naked and waits.
There are crows and there are crows. The interesting thing about the crow is that it has always been both a wisdom animal and a harbinger of death. It all depends where you dig for the elusive crow. If you go to such archetypal psychiatrists such as Hillman and Herzog, you’ll find that the crow becomes an emblem of death. If you delve into Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies like TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED, you’ll find that the crow becomes a trickster or a spirit guide. Or, if you just happened to read Ted Hughes’ CROW, you’ve been bitten by the best. Try sucking that poison out.
The title LAUGHING AT FUNERALS can be a bit misleading since this book really has little or nothing to do with funerals at all. Unless, you realize that the entire book is a kind of elaborate funeral manual. Or, lets put it this way. FUNERALS is a one off book of death rituals. A contemporary book of the dead.
By now most of us have heard about such famous books of the dead as THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD, THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. Even Michael Lesy’s WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP is a kind of book of the dead. McLean’s book goes a step beyond both the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead. Those two volumes are really manuals for the ways in which the dead should conduct themselves in the underworld or in the death world wherever they may be. McLean’s book is actually a series of rituals for the way that we should conduct ourselves in the face of our obvious and inescapable oblivion.
bodhisattva vow
there is no Buddha, no nirvana,
no eternity. all is a brown ring of
dry shit stinking in no night
and nothing to save. no man
or woman or sin or anything.
there is a hole to fall in and
nirvana never. forever
is not heaven
So, if LAUGHING AT FUNERALS is a secular book of the dead and the rituals that McLean offers the reader are ones which offer no hope now or in any other world, then actually what is the point? During the Middle Ages when the plague hit European cities, people went out into the streets to attempt to dance death out of themselves. They actually believed that if they danced with enough frenzy, then they could rid themselves of the buboes, the infection.
i like to eat your cunt
because it makes me an incarnation
of my meat, and the flesh
grows bigger and less lonely,
more me, just generally,
i like to eat like children
dream or mourning
bleeds
(From eating you)
If there is nothing beyond death, then why not dive into the frenzy of that nothing rather than just sit and wait for it?
tomorrow
tomorrow smells like murder
but the sun is shining here
and nothing is interested
in the coming slaughter
so we sacrifice ourselves
tonight to life, but breathe
a minute here under the loveless
sunlight
My favorite line in this book is “tomorrow smells like murder…” And, it probably does. If LAUGHING AT FUNERALS does nothing else it provides us all with a text to read on the eve of the apocalypse. It is a series of frenzies meant to be performed against the frenzy. A rage before the serenity of nothing.
Laughing at Funerals by David McLean. 98 Pages
ISBN 978-0981184456
Epic Rites Press, 2010
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